Roll On Sanity...

I love the kids down at the diner, I really do.  They’re great.  Lost, confused, fighting for a place to call their own, a home in a heart to go the distance for them, you know, all the nobility of youth so often overlooked by those embarrassed to admit they did exactly the same things.  And beyond that they’re so often an inspiration to me.  The years between us open a parallax for me, put things in a perspective I’d never see otherwise.  They’re great.

There’s one particular lass down there I’m getting ever more fond of, she reminds me in many ways of both my wife and my muse in about equal measure.  She’s very much her own woman, but yea, she was built from the same sort of things as the others, no way she wasn’t and turn out like she is.  We flirt a lot, it’s a game between us.  She has her man and she loves him, I totally respect their relationship, but she likes to flirt and I’m about the most harmless person possible for her to play with on a slow afternoon.  It’s almost a lost art, flirting, and she’s good at it.  But flirting isn’t what this post is about, even though we were indeed doing just that when she popped open a thought for me that really does run deep, way deep, into the human condition.  It’s kind of subtle, and yet fits so very many things to be seen in reality.  Let me frame up the story for you.

The other day she shared that she was in a bit of a frump.  Not down, just kind of sideways off a little deeper into left field than she wanted to be.  A bit worried, a bit annoyed at and for her lad.  He was definitely off his feed, not feeling right about his world at all.  And of course she, good woman that she is, was responding to what his world was doing to him but not quite sure how to deal with the situation not being totally sure just how the situation had come to be.  For a bit we talked about the situation, mostly me just trying to draw her out, help her put the facts into words where maybe they’d be easier for her to organize.  A friend thing, you know?

Anyway, what emerged was that her lad was suffering, at least in part, to the fact that he’s the only male working with six women who’ve worked together for a long time.  Six women who’ve worked together for so long they have, as women in a tight knit group so often will, synchronized their cycle.  She said they were driving him crazy, that the poor boy just couldn’t catch a break, that about the time that time of the month was over for her they were just getting started.  I said I sympathized with his predicament, which I do.  She kind of shrugged, and said “yea, that’s close to how I feel right now, like it’s just fixing to start even though I know I just finished.”  She kind of went blank for a moment, and then shrugged.  I heard something make a tiny “click” in the back of my mind.  Something was trying to make a connection.

Then she looked out and away with that look on her face, I mean that  look.  I chuckled, and in full and compassionate understanding of why that  look would show up at that point in such a conversation said “ah sweetheart, the only thing you really need is for someone to bend you over the bed and not let up until you don’t have enough breath left to beg more of what stole your breath in the first place.”  She brightened up like the sun, big smile, suddenly shining eyes feral and hungry and with a bit of amazement in her voice said “yea, that’s exactly what I need!” as if she hadn’t really recognized it for what it was being as how by her calendar it wasn’t at all the right time of the month for that  to be a power player influencing her mood. 

Now I was just flirting, trying to lighten the moment by shifting into something safer like joking about the sort of enthusiastic sex that goes down mostly just for grins and bragging rights,  moving away from what really was getting rather to personal.  That was what I’d intended, but not what happened.  She looked me in the eye, and what was in her glance was indescribable.  It wasn’t anger, it wasn’t embarrassment, it wasn’t an invitation, but whatever it was it exploded in the back side of my brain producing one of those light bulb moments, an epiphany I think they’re called.

What if a big chunk of what drives, and overdrives, so many of the modern women has for a beginning contradictory hormonal signals being carried to her by others in her world?  Signals out of phase with hers?  Just how much unhappiness might that be generating?  Just how much of the needless angst and anxiety and tension might be starting right there?

A great many things, confusing and disturbing things, about the modern world fall out in neatly ordered ranks when examined in the light of such a thought.

The girls respond to such signals far, far more than the boys do, that’s both folk wisdom and proven by science.  No doubt one of those bell curve - normal distribution kind of things as to just how much any given woman would be effected.  The ends of that curve would be of course -not at all-  running out to -eating mood pills by the handful-  (much to the pharmaceutical industries profit... hmmm...). 

Equally the girls are much more tribal than the boys are, have been for all of recorded history... my troop, my tribe, my village.  The cliques in high school give solid evidence of just how deep that instinct goes, stack a bunch of women in the same place for any length of time and they’ll form tribes to call their own.  Do they form such tribes trying to make sure they are keeping closest company with other women whose biology is producing a hormonal signature compatible with their own? (hmmm, again hmmm... 28 day cycle, just how many phase angles does that generate? And to what effect along the interfaces? Perhaps a neat little problem in topography welded onto social psychology...)  Something the high school counselor set might want to consider, being as how educating females is a relatively new thing compared to the run of human history.

One other fact comes screaming out of the blue where this thought is concerned: only in the last century has the world really become co-ed enough for these functions to really find a great deal of traction across the macroscopic population!  Only recently, as history accounts such things, have the girls and the boys mixed company on a regular enough basis for such signals to really become an ongoing problem, self sustaining on the mechanisms of momentum by memory.  Once again, the social convergence and re-orientations of World War Two glare in the spotlight. 

Good grief.  This thought even goes Biblical, all the way back to Leviticus in the Old Testament.  Yes, Leviticus, the most mocked book of the Bible, and yet perhaps the prophet really was onto something when he said do not wear two different cloths on your body... cloth, in those days a thing exclusively produced by females, each cloth unique to it’s village which in turn would mean saturated in the hormonal signature unique to the women who produced it.  He didn’t say don’t wear cloth from a different village, he said don’t mix two of them at the same time.  Why?  Of course, you don’t want to carry home to your woman a possibly conflicted set of signals that could cause your life and hers to head for hell riding in their very own hand-basket, of course not!  A great deal of the Old Testament was simply solid wisdom concerning survival, perhaps this thought is actually big enough to have gotten a spot in that ancient repository of wisdom.  God knows better than anyone how many things in that book have ridden across the years by rote only to be explained in modern times by science. 

This thought even explains the current thing about girls shaving all the hair off their body: body hair, the broadcast antenna of the hormonal signals.  Yup, that fits as well.  What a thought.

Oh, and the title of this post?  Just how much of the modern cosmetics/hygiene industry is actually dedicated to trying to suppress this very function?  All the damn perfumes and colognes and aftershaves and deodorants?  And most of them (the cheap and common ones anyway) totally saturated with pthalic and alcohol?  Yea, roll it on, spray it on, bathe in it, do something to knock down all those conflicting signals that are beating on the girls from every side in this brave new congested overpopulated cross domain dependent world of ours.  Old man Leviticus may get the last laugh after all.

So yea, I really love the kids down at the diner.  There’s one lass I most definitely owe a big thank you to, I’m thinking more watermelon (she loves watermelon) and wine (gentler than vodka) and neat music she hasn’t heard before (and yea, she’s quite welcome to cuddle her lad on the couch while listening, they’re really kind of pretty together), because I’m thinking she may have cracked open an understanding of a really major hidden power player for me, and maybe for you as well.  She endured the discomfort to make it happen, she deserves a thank you in the same realms.